Particularity of Construction Project Management in Qatar
Particularity of Construction Project Management in Qatar
Got too many subcontractors to handle?
According to project management experts, you can spot major
trouble on the horizon if you keep your eyes peeled for any of [the] poor
project planning symptoms’ (Taylor, 2008[i])
Working in the business of
construction in Qatar for the last eight years, I noticed what can be called
repetitive management mistakes in the various projects and titles I have been
at.
The Qatari business market succeeded
to attract a numerous investors, contractors and PM firms while the management
culture is not adult enough to absorb the sudden changes.
In this article I am trying to
simply and share the critical typical challenges a project may confront due to
lack of the poor design of an Organisation Chart.
This can easily be seen in the
numerous stakeholders involved in a construction project her in Qatar.
Subcontracting strategy is adopted
by most if not all of construction stakeholder working currently in Qatar due
to the attractive fast growing construction business in Qatar.
Adopting subcontracting strategy
can lead to serious troubles in project management if not well controlled.
Below is real life case study of
one of the under construction large scales projects in Qatar. The project which
was 2.3 Billion $ suffered obviously from a blind communication spot at the
bottom of its organisation chart OC and lack of control by the main contractor
over the subcontractors.
A glance on the OC would make one
feel really comfortable to describe it as an over loaded organisation chart
An example of this is the Main
Contractors Technical department OC as a random segment for analysis. The OC
was built to have a technical manager at the top followed by the seven sub
section managers (Architectural Manager, Structural Manager and etc.) those are
followed by a line of senior staff who are followed by the engineers and
architects who supervise the subcontractor technical offices where the real
technical runs shifting all the mess deeper in the OC.
A normal daily communication process
had to start from the subcontractor all the way up to the main contractors’
technical manager to decide what to do with it.
A request for information could
take easily three weeks between it approaches from the sub-contractor engineer till
it reaches the consultant for an answer.
The
corrective actions suggested for this was to take line of the heads of sections
out of OC for a shorter OC. Just write it off to allow efficient communication
and to arrange a series of daily workshops among the Cub-contractors, the
consultant and the main contractor for mitigating the previous time creep.
The lesson
could be learnt for a PM considers moving to Qatar is to think twice before
hiring sub-contractors some in-house working may be more feasible for the
project and the organisation trying to design a slimmer Organisation Charts.
Simply follow the rules, Develop the project Work Breakdown Structure into an
OC not the other way around.
[i] Joe Taylor Jr. (2008) ‘Five
Signs Your Team Suffers From Poor Project Planning ’.Bright up!. http://www.brighthub.com/office/project-management/articles/3700.aspx [Accessed 18 March
2009]
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